Reliability and Downtime: Observing and poor weather have been balanced about
50:50 which is disappointing, but it is Winter. Technical downtime has again fallen to 10%
after the small increase in the preceding month. We are very pleased with this
consistent performance since the mid Summer.

Tropical Storm Delta hit the Canaries at the end of the month causing a lot of damage,
very little of which was at the observatory. Our anemometer does not read above 65mph, but
the NOT weather station appears to have registered winds exceeding 90mph. Damage to LT included
the loss of a sign and a small external out-house, loosening of the weather station rain gauge
and damp inside the webcam, so nothing which prevented observations once the weather cleared.

Engineering: There have been three visits to site since the last report. One
was predominantly electrical and IT related, working on increasing system robustness
and replacing failed hard drives.

The second included TTL engineers and mostly
involved software upgrades. The full software infrastructure of high and low-level
software (excluding just the TCS) has been updated to the latest TTL release versions.
It has been over a year since the last upgrade. Despite a small
problem with the focus mechanism which is fully resolved, no observational time was
lost due to the software change which was performed in a staged manner over several
days. Some minimal work was also possible to investigate the optical astigmatism
and the results of that work are still under analysis.

The third visit was for instrument commissioning. Two new instruments, the RINGO
polarimeter and the
Meaburn Spectrograph
have seen first
light and are currently undergoing robotic commissioning to allow their routine use.
Neither are common user instruments, but further details can be found in a
news item on the
LT web pages.
The bad news on the instrumentation front is the damage to the cryogenic system for
SupIRCam. We have already directly contacted all users of this instrument with
further details of the problem.

Queen's Anniversary Prize: It has been announced that the work of the
ARI, including the Liverpool Telescope has led to Liverpool John Moores University being awarded
the biennial Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education, one of the UK's
most prestigious educational awards. Further details can be found in a
news item on the
LT web pages.

Reliabilty and Downtime: A significant amount of time was lost this month as
a consequence of the brush fires on La Palma (this is noted as "Weather" in
the statistics). We would like to thank all the employees of
the ORM and staff from several other telescopes whose efforts saved the
observatory site facilities from serious damage. From the numbers above, you will see that
excluding the scheduled maintenance, the telescope downtime resulting
from technical faults has again been very low this month.

Engineering: The September engineering trip went very well with almost everything
we had hoped for being completed. The mirror was recoated and new zero points will be
published soon on the RATCam information web page. A
first look reduction shows a 0.3 mag increase in SDSS r' throughput. Work on the
cassegrain rotator appears to have significantly improved its performance, which should
in turn bring pointing and tracking improvements. The optics have been recollimated better
than they were before the engineering work and investigations are ongoing to see if work on
the secondary mechanism has had any effect, beneficial or detrimental on the focussing. A
new pointing model has been installed with an RMS pointing error of about 8 arcsec. For the
first two weeks of October, a small fraction of each night will be spent on further
engineering and performance tests, but the telescope is effectively back in full science
operations.

Imager Field Rotation: The most pleasing outcome of the downtime is that the cassegrain
de-rotator cable wrap has been reorganised in such a
way as to allow a full 360 degree travel. Users can now specify the field rotation they
would like for each observation. For all targets currently loaded in the phase II database,
a default orientation of 'sky position angle = 0' has been assumed. If you require a field
orientation other than this, please contact the support astronomer, Chris Moss, just as
you would to make any modification to your observing strategy.

Support: Until now, users have been only been able to access their data through
the "Recent Data" pages. You can now
download your data from the archive search
results screen. You will still need to input your proposal ID and password.

Time Applications: Applications for PATT semester 2006A have closed.
For semester 2006A, the PATT oversubscription rate for available time was
3.8. Following a release of engineering time to supplement the available
PATT time, the oversubscription rate was readjusted to 1.8 (324.5 hours
requested for a total of 180.8 hours available for the semester; in
addition, 235.2 hours have been pre-allocated to the semester from PATT
proposals in previous semesters.) Calls are expected to be made soon for the JMU
TAG and ITP international time.
Announcements will be made on the
News web page.

First I would like to thank all those who contributed science results to
the recent telescope operations report for PPARC. It was good to see so
many interesting results starting to come from the telescope. Equally we
thank those who gave feedback about the telescope performance limitations
which had prevented you yet producing any results from the LT. All these
comments and suggestions have been discussed and we have been able to
respond positively to many of you.

Reliability:
The most obvious headline this month has to be the extremely encouraging
increase in telescope reliability. This has certainly been our best month
yet with only 5% technical downtime and only one full night being lost.
The weather
has been a little disappointing for August.

If you read the nightly reports, you will see a variety of small one-off
problems which have been fixed as the come up. The only two re-occurring
problems to have lost us time this month have been the mysterious network
losses to the various nodes and initialisation errors of the focus
mechanism. The latter has been fully resolved in software. The former is
still under investigation.

Performance:
Those receiving data will know that there continues to be work to be done
on the tracking performance of the telescope, however significant
improvements have been made since the last report. Following the
re-alignment of the Azimuth encoder system at the end of June, the
fraction of severely trailed images has dropped from 10% to 2%.
There will be an extended period of engineering down-time
in September which is to include installation of the new auto-guider to
help address the tracking limitations.

We are now also using a new pointing model which was derived following the
encoder realignment. Pointing repeatability within a night is better than
10 arcsec RMS and absolute accuracy from night to night adds a further 10
arcsec RMS error.

Support:
There have been further minor changes in the
data archive and
MyLT web pages. Both have been made more robust and the "Recent Data" pages at
Recent Data
have been subdivided by proposal
ID. We hope this makes it easier for you to quickly locate your data.

The application guidelines
have been fully revised for PATT semester 06A.
Please take a look before submitting your application.

There are still a few programmes which have been allocated time in
semester 2005B for which we have not received
phase 2 observation specification forms.
As soon as we get these forms, the data can be
loaded to the database and be ready for observation. Of course, if you
have target-of-opportunity time, you obviously cannot submit forms early.

Another mixed month in terms of hours observed. The first half of the month was very good, but
a lot of time has been lost in the second half of the month to the failure of the mirror cover
to open. This has now been fixed. Whilst on the subject of telescope problems, users should note that
several times this month the telescope was going in and out of focus during the night. The badly
defocussed data has not been distributed to users.

Engineering: The promised site visit by a joint TTL / ARI team has taken place. A full review of
the performance of the hydraulic system was performed, but it is too early to say if there will be
any major changes in telescope performance. Some work was also done on the Azimuth encoders which has made a
very significant improvement the telescope tracking.

Support: Dr. Chris Moss has been making contact with many observers and discussion with them has
started to increase observing efficiency for several programmes through increasing our understanding of
user requirements. In more tangible changes, there have been some modifications to the data archive. Most of
these will not be obvious to the user, but there have been a few formatting changes to the archive
search tools
(Data Archive).
Most significantly, the new data subdirectories available at
Recent Data
are now arranged to put all the data from a given
night together rather than the previous practice of filing them according to UT date which led to each
night's data getting split across two subdirectories.

Email Contact: Finally, we wanted to make sure everyone was aware
that emails get sent to project PIs to notify them as soon as any data has been obtained and are
available in the archive. Several PIs have not been receiving these emails due to the configuration of
firewalls and email SPAM filters. If you know that data have been obtained for your programme, but you have
not had an email about them, please let us know so that we can monitor the extent of this problem. You can
always check the new data page
(Recent Data) or
MyLiverpoolTelescope to see if you have any new data available.

Science: We have had a real science highlight this month, with our best yet fully automated GRB response. The LT
obtained multi-colour photometry of GRB050502 starting 3 minutes after the Integral gamma-ray
detection. See the news story on the LT News page or
in the news archive.

Engineering: Telescope reliabilty is up again this month after a disappointing April. Following my upbeat comments in
the April report, the first week of May proved very poor. The two main
problems were a sticky Cass bearing and a hydraulic pump motor failure. The latter was replaced
and has not given us any further problems. Since this is the second pump replaced this year (see Jan 2005),
a full recheck of the hydraulic scavenge system has been scheduled for June. The cass bearing problems are
currently more mysterious and TTL will be helping us investigate this also in June. In the meantime, we have
a work-around which has kept us observing most of the month.
We spent a couple of nights on a more thorough analysis of the pointing performance. The great majority
of pointings are currently within 30arcsec of the field centre, though there still occaissional unexplained errors up to
2 arcmin.

Support: It has become clear that the differences between the way
the LT and traditional observatories operate has caused a significant stumbling
block for many observers preventing optimum exploitation of the telescope.
This month, Dr Chris Moss has joined the LT operations group as
our new support astronomer. He will not be involved in any routine maintenance
and operations, allowing him to concentrate on helping all users obtain the
maximum scientific returns from their observing time. He will be overseeing
and providing expert advice throughout the application, scheduling and observing
process. Revisions to the submission procedures will be announced soon, but
in the mean time he can be contacted
via the LT Helpdesk at this address(updated
5th Nov 2007).

Other: The Live Data page has been made public
online. You can check on the LT weather station and the state of various telescope mechanisms at any time. On
moonlit nights you can even see the telescope moving on the webcam.

Engineering: The first half of the night was blighted by degrading Azimuth bearing oil flow performance. A site visit was therefore
scheduled for mid-month. Following the work on 20/05/05, no further time has been lost and the telescope has performed
reliably for the last week of the month.

Date

Hours Used

Comment

Observing

Weather

Technical

30 Apr 2005

0.0

7.9

0.0

High humidity

29 Apr 2005

8.0

0.0

0.0

Full night of robotic data

27 Apr 2005

8.0

0.0

0.0

Full night of robotic data (photometric)

26 Apr 2005

6.0

0.0

2.0

Network problem

25 Apr 2005

0.0

8.1

0.0

Thick clouds

24 Apr 2005

8.1

0.0

0.0

Cirrus (non-photometric). Observed all night without problems

23 Apr 2005

0.0

8.1

0.0

Thick Cloud

22 Apr 2005

8.1

0.0

0.0

Thin cirrus. New pointing model derived and applied. Science Operations for rest of night. No failures.

21 Apr 2005

0.0

8.2

0.0

Thick clouds

20 Apr 2005

0.0

8.2

0.0

Azimuth guide pad adjustment carried out. Telescope available again for operations. Thick clouds on site however.

March 2005Hours spent
Observing: 121, Weather: 132, Technical downtime: 38.First
half of month spent under the tail end of the blizzards that
prevented observing during February. Observations were back
underway around mid-March.

Date

Hours Used

Comment

Observing

Weather

Technical

31 Mar 2005

4.9

4.0

0

High humidity

30 Mar 2005

0.3

0.0

8.6

Azimuth homing

29 Mar 2005

8.0

0.0

1.0

Azimuth lost homing three times during the night

28 Mar 2005

8.6

0.0

0.4

Azimuth lost homing, autorecovered ok, (non-photometric)

27 Mar 2005

9.1

0.0

0.0

Full night of robotic data (photometric)

26 Mar 2005

9.1

0.0

0.0

Full night of robotic data (photometric)

25 Mar 2005

9.1

0.0

0.0

Full night of robotic data (photometric)

24 Mar 2005

6.2

3.0

0.0

High humidity until 23:30, then non-photometric

23 Mar 2005

9.2

0.0

0.0

Full night of robotc data (photometric)

22 Mar 2005

8.5

0.0

0.7

Altitude Node Failed, Autorecovery worked

21 Mar 2005

0.0

9.2

0.0

High humidity

20 Mar 2005

0.7

0.0

8.6

Problems with wetness sensor

19 Mar 2005

6.3

3.0

0.0

Thick cloud at start of night, non-photometric

18 Mar 2005

7.7

0.0

1.6

Some initial focus problems, a lot of cloud, non-photometric

17 Mar 2005

8.0

0.0

1.4

Azimuth lost homing at start of night. Recovered ok. (non-photometric)

16 Mar 2005

9.4

0.0

0.0

Full Night of robotic data (non-photometric)

15 Mar 2005

9.4

0.0

0.0

Full Night of robotic data (non-photometric)

14 Mar 2005

2.0

0.0

7.4

Aux Mech Watchdog / CANBus failure

13 Mar 2005

0.0

9.4

0

High humidity

12 Mar 2005

1.0

8.5

0

High humidity

11 Mar 2005

1.0

8.5

0

High humidity

10 Mar 2005

1.0

0

8.5

Air Compressor Fault

09 Mar 2005

1.0

8.6

0

08 Mar 2005

0

9.6

0

Weather clear. Enclosure hydraulic mechanism still clogged with ice.

07 Mar 2005

0

9.6

0

Weather clear. Enclosure hydraulic mechanism still clogged with ice.

06 Mar 2005

0

9.7

0

Weather clear. Enclosure hydraulic mechanism still clogged with ice.

05 Mar 2005

0

9.7

0

04 Mar 2005

0

9.7

0

03 Mar 2005

0

9.8

0

SPLC code reloaded.

02 Mar 2005

0

9.8

0

SPLC failure. Time would have been lost to this if it were not for the weather which is still foul.

01 Mar 2005

0

9.8

0

February 2005
Time used (Observing:Weather:Fault) 0 : 283.9 : 0

Weather: Incredible as it may seem, we have not opened the enclosure once in February, entirely due to
weather. We do not yet have archival LT weather data on-line, but you can see how bad it has been from the
ING weather station. For two weeks of the month, the telescope
was not contactable due to a circuit breaker supplying the IT equipment tripping and it being impossible to
gain access to site to reset it. Two LT staff made an emergency visit to help Dirk with the anticipated
clean-up. In fact things were not as bad as feared though there is still significant water ingress to the
enclosure during high winds.
The new top-seal guttering has made a great difference. The telescope has been started up and run under local
supervision. We expect it to be available as soon as the weather clears and ice melts. The autoguider
has also been returned to Birkenhead and TTL are working on fixing the problems we have had. Of course
none of the work done during the January maintenance visit has yet been properly tested on-sky.

Automation: On the automation front, general system
robustness testing has continued despite being unable to observe and we have removed the restriction which stopped
the telescope re-opening during the night after any technical fault (see Dec. 2004 report). This means that any
minor problems which can be fixed by the automated fault recovery routines will no longer lead to the loss of
the rest of the night.

Cleared
for a few hours hours. Then freezing fog. WHT did manage to open. Seems
we may be slightly more prone to ice in the enclosure mechanism than
them. Experience long term will tell.

24 Feb 2005

0

9.9

0

Guess what. It's snowing.

23 Feb 2005

0

10.0

0

Still ice and 100% humidity.

22 Feb 2005

0

10.0

0

Still ice and 100% humidity.

21 Feb 2005

0

10.0

0

Gained access to LT and powered up. Looks good so far.

20 Feb 2005

0

10.0

0

LT site closed.

19 Feb 2005

0

10.0

0

LT site closed.

18 Feb 2005

0

10.1

0

Road
cleared but it started snowing again. Due to insufficient
infrastructure (e.g., medical backup), no attempt will be made to
access site over the coming weekend even in the unlikely event of the
road clearing.

17 Feb 2005

0

10.1

0

Road clearance proceeding, but reached a difficult section.

16 Feb 2005

0

10.1

0

Road clearance proceeding. LT will certainly still be offline 16/02/2005

15 Feb 2005

0

10.1

0

Road clearance is underway. Prediction is to get to the telescopes on Thursday

14 Feb 2005

0

10.1

0

Snow.

13 Feb 2005

0

10.2

0

Snow. Site evacuated.

12 Feb 2005

0

10.2

0

Snow. It's white.

11 Feb 2005

0

10.2

0

More Snow. Mountain top cut off.

10 Feb 2005

0

10.2

0

More Snow. Mountain top cut off.

09 Feb 2005

0

10.3

0

Snow

08 Feb 2005

0

10.3

0

Ice, fog

07 Feb 2005

0

10.3

0

Ice, fog

06 Feb 2005

0

10.3

0

Ice remains, and high winds pre-alert

05 Feb 2005

0

10.4

0

Ice returned and prevented opening enclosure

04 Feb 2005

0

10.4

0

Ice melted during day, freezing fog at night

03 Feb 2005

0

10.4

0

Ice, fog

02 Feb 2005

0

10.4

0

May be clearing. Still too much ice on enclosure to open.

01 Feb 2005

0

10.4

0

Ice.

January 2005
Time used (Observing:Weather:Fault) 93.7 : 133.4 : 102.5
This month we had a "IT & mechanical servicing mission" with two staff from ARI joining Dirk on-site for a week.
During their visit they installed a variety of new IT equipment, installed new webcams (accessable from this web site),
made a long-term fix to the
enclosure locks (see Dec. 2004 report) and portal guide rollers, investigated oil flow limit
problems (see 11-13/01/05) and ran
further tests on ongoing autoguider problems (we now think the chip is not salvageable). Most of the above
were resolved successfully and we are anticipating an increased system robustness over the next couple of months.
Weather has been terrible as you can see.

On the automation side, we obtained twilight flat-fields
using the fully automated routines for the first time. This will hopefully be integrated into the daily autonomous
operations in the coming month.

Date

Hours Used

Comment

Observing

Weather

Technical

31 Jan 2005

0

10.5

0

Ice

30 Jan 2005

0

10.5

0

Ice

29 Jan 2005

0

10.5

0

Ice

28 Jan 2005

0

10.6

0

Lots of ice

27 Jan 2005

0

10.6

0

Lots of ice

26 Jan 2005

0

10.6

0

Freezing fog

25 Jan 2005

4.0

2.0

4.6

01:19. Oil level fault.

24 Jan 2005

10.6

0

0

23 Jan 2005

3.0

0

7.6

22:39:37. mcc lost contact with alt node. No further diagnostics available in messages log.

22 Jan 2005

7.6

0

3.0

21 Jan 2005

10.6

0

0

20 Jan 2005

0

0

10.7

Continuing work on hydraulic scavenge pump.

19 Jan 2005

0

10.7

0

Pre-alerta for storms overnight. Seems weather was not bad in the event.